Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Performance

There is just one week left until Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will
be released, but is it worth the upgrade if you are running a netbook? From our
testing of the development releases, it is most certainly worth the upgrade, especially
when compared to Ubuntu 9.04 with its buggy Intel driver stack that caused
many problems for Atom netbook users. Ubuntu 9.10 brings many usability improvements
to the Linux desktop, various new packages, and the overall system performance
has improved too. We have ran a set of benchmarks on both a Dell
Inspiron Mini 9 and Samsung
NC10 under Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 to illustrate the performance gains along
with a few regressions.

The Intel Atom N270 CPU with an Intel Mobile 945GME Chipset with integrated
Intel graphics powers both the Dell Mini 9 and Samsung NC10. The Inspiron Mini
9 though was loaded up with 1GB of RAM and an 8GB STEC PATA SSD while the NC10
ran with 2GB of RAM and a 32GB OCZ Core Series SSD. Clean installations of Ubuntu
9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" and Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" were
done to both of these netbooks, which were then left to run with their stock settings,
including the use of Compiz.

The tests we ran to compare Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Dell and Samsung
netbooks were OpenArena, LAME MP3 encoding, 7-Zip compression, LZMA compression,
IOzone, PostMark, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Crafty, GtkPerf, and QGears2. All of this
testing was done through the Phoronix
Test Suite, of course.